Thread by @DellAnnaLuca

Imagine you were an alien. On your planet, there aren’t schools. From your spaceship, you spend some time observing one of ours.

What would you guess schools are for?

(a thread on education)

I bet that education wouldn’t be the first of your hypotheses. After all, schools deliver much better on other metrics.

For example,

2/N

Did you ever notice that most degrees are of the same length regardless of the complexity of the underlying field, and that some subjects are obsolete, as if their purpose was to employ teachers rather than teach useful skills?

3/N

It is almost as if universities were designed to serve their teachers and administrators rather than their students.

4/N

Sometimes, it takes being an alien to notice that systems with a stated purpose aren’t designed around it.

Some examples:
committees (as Taleb noted, they are not designed around taking decisions but around distancing decisions-makers from the risks of their decisions) and…

…and foreign interventions: as the last 20 years in Afghanistan showed, they’re not designed around improving the lives of poor populations but around enriching the military-industrial complex. The US spent about $2T = $53k per Afghan: how much did any average Afghan see of it?

The point is not that schools are bad. They’re great at many things – daycare, for example, or mitigating the outcomes of some difficult familial situations.

7/N

The point is that we shouldn’t trust the stated purpose of systems.

Instead, we can disbelieve the illusion and ask ourselves, what are they great at?

And if we don’t like the answer, can we redesign them around a different purpose?

8/N

What if tests weren’t to grade students but to show them that practice leads to competence? What would they look like?

And if teachers weren’t there to regurgitate books but to motivate students, what would they do, and how would they be selected?

And what if subjects weren’t a checklist of “must-know” concepts, but represented a set of skills, what would they look like?